About Gord Rachar

Gord Rachar has a strong personal interest in engineering automation and information management based on over 35 years of experience in plant design, construction, and operations. He became interested in ISO 15926 as soon as he heard about it, and volunteered to write some introductory material to help newcomers get up to speed faster. The fruit of this labor, "An Introduction to ISO 15926", was released recently by Fiatech. A piping designer by trade, he currently manages a 3D engineering design system for WorleyParsons in Edmonton, Canada. (However he is not an official speaker for WorleyParsons; his opinions expressed here are entirely his own.)
Gord's plant engineering experience includes supervising a design office and setting up standards, brownfield and greenfield engineering design and cost estimating, construction progress and quality monitoring, and fabrication shop spooling and production planning. He has additional experience developing industrial piping specifications, developing software for engineering applications, and technical writing.
He is currently writing for the Oil and Gas Interoperability (OGI) Pilot.

In an earlier post, Is a Generic Data Model Like Generic Peas? we said that because anyone can update the Reference Data Library (RDL) that it will collect garbage, and that this was a good thing. If you’ve ever been involved with cleaning up a mature database this was probably quite a surprise. People whose job […]

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In a previous article, ISO 15926 – A Decades-long Overnight Success, we told how ISO 15926 was born from the decision to split the large, comprehensive data model of STEP into two parts; Part 2, a generic data model, and Part 4, a library of reference data, or just the RDL. We have written several […]

On September 25, 2012, at the ISA Automation conference in Orlando, we witnessed a demonstration of the Oil & Gas Interoperability Pilot (OGI Pilot), the most significant information exchange project to date in the capital projects industry. Here we will describe what happened during the demonstration and give you a peek under the hood at […]

We have mentioned several times in our writing, the names XMpLant, XMpLant Schema, Proteus, and Proteus Schema as if everyone understood what they are. But some folks have had questions so we will shed a bit of light on the subject. Short Answer XMpLant: A brand name owned by Noumenon Consulting out of the UK. XMpLant […]

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About a year ago a core group of proponents of ISO 15926 decided to adopt the brand name iRING to represent all things ISO 15926. So if your software or work processes or writing contains any quantum of ISO 15926 you could legitimately say “iRING Inside”. The feeling was that a bunch of random numbers was […]

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We have said many times that ISO 15926 seeks to make information smarter, which is opposite to the AI approach of making the machine smarter. To make information smarter we have said that ISO 15926 drives the meaning of the data into the data itself. Here we will give you a glimpse of how this […]

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The Holy Grail in information exchange is that our machines know what our data means so that they can move it between business partners reliably without needing us to guide them. ISO 15926 has come a long way towards that goal by pushing the meaning of the data into the data itself instead of using AI […]

When you are implementing ISO 15926, one of the more significant tasks is representing your information in the standard form of ISO 15926 so that the software on each end of the exchange can understand what it means. In public presentations we are sometimes told that this task involves something called “Information Modeling” but few […]

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In our previous post, What Are Endpoints – Part 1, we said that endpoints are simply places to store stuff in a way that ISO 15926 tools can query and get a response. This is a good enough explanation for an introductory level, but if you intend to implement ISO 15926 in the real world you […]

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One question that came from my previous post, Understanding the ISO 15926 RDL, was “What is an endpoint?” The comparison I had made to a dictionary was understood, but “Is there more?” Well, yes: Q. What is an Endpoint? A. An endpoint is just a place to store stuff, with the provision that ISO 15926 […]

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Introduction to ISO 15926

Published by Fiatech for its members, this ebook is ideal for managers and executives who are interested in the learning about of ISO 15926, the value of information interoperability and specific steps that can be take to get started.